Tag: systems theory

Service Delivery: Delay Is the Control Parameter

Post author By G
Post date Jan 1, 2026
1 Comment on Service Delivery: Delay Is the Control Parameter

Executive summary Delay is not a flaw to be engineered away. It is the control parameter that sets a system’s operating frequency. Most complex organisational and institutional service delivery systems tend to fail when their timing is misaligned with the realities they are intended to regulate. That misalignment is rarely visible as a single “slow […]

Tags adaptive-systems, burnout, change management, complex systems, complexity management, control theory, cybernetics, decision-making under uncertainty, delay, delay management, digital operations, emergency services, enterprise IT, error propagation, escalation loops, escalation management, feedback delay, feedback loops, frequency domain, frontline operations, governance design, healthcare systems, human factors, incident management, institutional failure, institutional trust, IT help desk, IT service management, itsm, KPIs, operational efficiency, operational excellence, operational resilience, operational risk, organisational behaviour, organisational debt, organisational design, organisational learning, organisational systems, performance metrics, phase lag, problem management, public sector services, queue dynamics, queueing theory, resilience engineering, rework, service delivery, service delivery management, service desk operations, service reliability, SLA design, socio-technical systems, system failure modes, system stability, systems control, systems theory, systems thinking, technical debt, throughput vs quality, workflow design, workload management

cybernetics

What Is New Year’s Eve?

New Year’s Eve is not a clean break in time. It is a maintenance ritual. It presents itself as a boundary between years, as if time were neatly divided and we simply step from one container into the next. That framing works because cognitive, communicative systems like ours require distinctions to operate. We draw lines […]

Philosophy

2026 Technocracy: More Control, Less Comprehension

Post author By G
Post date Dec 31, 2025
No Comments on 2026 Technocracy: More Control, Less Comprehension

We are likely worrying about the wrong thing. The danger is not that AI amplifies stupidity, volatility, selfishness, or ideological corruption. The danger is the speed of that amplification, the smoothness with which it integrates into ordinary life, and the ease with which this acceleration is framed as inevitable. It is not inevitable. But velocity […]

Tags 2026, AI and power, AI governance, AI risks, algorithmic governance, algorithmic power, Artificial Intelligence, attention economy, authoritarian acceleration, authoritarianism, choice architecture, civilisational collapse, cognitive capture, collapse dynamics, complexity and governance, consequence deferral, control society, encoded choice, entropy, entropy and power, field logic, future collapse, future of humanity, global instability, late capitalism, loss of agency, mass psychosis, oscillatory instability, phase transition, platform capitalism, probability collapse, socio-technical systems, surveillance capitalism, systemic risk, systems collapse, systems theory, technocracy, technological determinism, technology and society

communication

Maintenance Mode

Modern systems do not fail for lack of intelligence; they fail because intelligence cannot be sustained inside them. What disrupts institutional self-reproduction is neutralised, not because it is wrong, but because it shortens the cycle. That is the sustainability problem. A civilisation that cannot maintain its own capacity for understanding cannot respond coherently to anything […]

Philosophy

Stultification Tsunami

The problem is not stupidity. Stupid ideas, taken individually, are manageable. They can be argued with, filtered, contextualised, ignored, or simply outgrown. Human cultures have always contained vast quantities of nonsense and survived quite well. That is not what is new. What is new is scale. A tsunami is not dangerous because each molecule of […]

Tags AGI hype, AI hype, algorithmic amplification, algorithmic governance, ambient stupidity, attention as power, attention economy, authoritarian drift, automation bias, catastrophic risk, civilizational risk, cognitive overload, cognitive stultification, collapse dynamics, collective cognition, collective stupidity, communication systems, complex systems, control and drift, coordination collapse, coordination failure, cultural phase shift, cybernetics, data poisoning, decision automation, disinformation campaigns, doomscrolling, engagement farming, entropic diffusion, entropy and information, epistemic crisis, epistemic pollution, externalities, feedback loops, field intelligence, global interdependence, herd cognition, high-velocity narratives, identity politics spiral, information hazard, information tsunami, institutional capture, jargon collapse, language networks, learned helplessness, linguistic entropy, LLM hallucinations, low-friction discourse, manufactured consent, manufactured stupidity, memetic warfare, model collapse, moral panic cycles, network effects, normalization of deviance, outrage machine, planetary scale systems, platform capitalism, post-truth politics, propaganda loops, reality distortion field, relational intelligence, runaway dynamics, second-order cybernetics, semantic drift, Shannon entropy, social media addiction, spectacle politics, superintelligence myth, sycophantic AI, synthetic consensus, systemic-fragility, systems theory, technocratic governance, there is no outside, tribal polarization, trust collapse, tsunami of dumb, unpayable costs, viral misinformation

communication

2026: The Stupid is Coming

Post author By G
Post date Dec 30, 2025
No Comments on 2026: The Stupid is Coming

The communicative field—call it language, media, platforms, signalling systems, whatever—does not sit outside us. It evolves through us, as us. What most people experience as agency, originality, or personal control is largely a selection effect inside a much larger communicative metabolism. We choose from it, we modulate it slightly, but the directionality is not ours. […]

cybernetics

Exclusionary Tactics

I lost a great deal of time mistaking other people’s expectations for responsibilities I was obliged to meet. Not because they were explicit, but because they were ambient. They arrived as tone, as assumption, as the quiet sense that something was already required before any choice was made. Quietly, over years, I volunteered to process […]

language

Symbolic Traffic

Language is a game in which winning, or apparent success, is characterised, celebrated, and sustained by the relational value of tokens within it. What actually wins is the communication system itself. Human projects, without exception, are functions of belief within language, of language. Success is the generation of more language. Wealth, politics, and sociocultural dominance […]

Philosophy

Absurd Superficiality

The absurdity of the social media game is structural, not moral. Everyone is incentivised to speak, assert experience, belief, or fact, yet attention is allocated to whatever compresses fastest. To be heard, meaning is thinned, context stripped, time and place over-determined into slogans. Throughput beats processing. What looks like participation is actually a selection regime […]

Tags algorithmic amplification, attention economy, cognitive compression, communication systems, Complexity, cultural pathology, digital culture, epistemic collapse, field logic, information overload, media critique, sense making, social media, systems theory

cybernetics

Technological Gullibility

Post author By G
Post date Dec 25, 2025
No Comments on Technological Gullibility

We are repeatedly assured—quietly, implicitly—that technology is beneficial, inevitable, and continuous. Accepting this assurance has become a mark of sophistication, a moral alibi that aligns seamlessly—and not accidentally—with reverence for wealth and the wealthy. What enriches those at the top is treated as evidence of correctness. Profit becomes a proxy for proof. Wealth no longer […]

Tags abstraction and control, accountability and responsibility, capital and legitimacy, coherence as validation, coherence vs truth, correspondence theory, critical theory technology, cybersecurity philosophy, deferred cost, deferred harm, description vs experience, digital capitalism, epistemic authority, field logic, hyper-capitalism, hypercapitalism, identity systems, inequality as control, institutional inertia, meaning and coherence, momentum over outcomes, narratives of progress, profit as proof, progress myth, selective accounting, semantic coherence, social trust erosion, sociotechnical systems, surveillance capitalism, systemic risk, systems inertia, systems theory, techno-ideology, technological gullibility, technological inevitability myth, technology and power, technology critique, wealth and epistemic power, wealth and power

cybernetics

Governance as Harmonic Coordination

Post author By G
Post date Dec 18, 2025
No Comments on Governance as Harmonic Coordination

Governance can be understood as the management of phase relations within an ensemble, not the enforcement of uniform behaviour. In any governed system—social, institutional, technical, or ecological—coherence does not arise from fixing positions or eliminating difference. It arises from partial synchronisation: agents align enough to act collectively while remaining out of phase enough to retain […]

Psychology

Vanishing Point: Self-ish

The self is commonly understood as something one has: a centre of experience, a point of view, a continuous “me” that persists through time. Psychological models tend to formalise this intuition by treating the self as a representational structure—narrative continuity, minimal experiential core, or predictive model—through which coherence can be maintained. This move is not […]

Tags absence, absent centre, authentication protocols, boundary-making, coherence without closure, communication systems, complex adaptive systems, coordinate systems, cybersecurity as coordination, distributed self, emptiness, entropy and coherence, field logic, i, identity, identity as process, identity credentials, identity theft, inside outside dissolution, institutional stabilisation, interoperability, language and meaning, meaning, meaning is elsewhere, non-orientable topology, perspective and projection, phase lag and control, recursion feedback loop, recursive self-reference, relational identity, representation and stability, representation language, self, self and environment, semantic field, stability through distinction, systems theory, systems-theoretical self, technology, uncertainty as condition, vanishing point